Dr Giulia Sciolli

I am a social anthropologist from Italy, who specializes in the study of medicine, mental health and the psy sciences. My research to date sits at the intersection between anthropologies of science and biomedicine, and anthropologies of ethics, care and kinship – as it examines practices and ethics of care in an Italian public treatment centre for people diagnosed with anorexia and bulimia nervosa. I am particularly interested in the everyday ethics of care practices for mental health conditions, and more broadly in notions of ‘the body’ and ‘the self’. I am currently Researcher at the Interdepartmental Centre for Research Ethics and Integrity of the Italian National Research Council based in Rome.

After obtaining a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology and Development Studies at the University of Sussex (UK) and a Master of Science in Medical Anthropology at University College London (UK), I completed a PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge (UK) in 2021.  My doctoral research, entitled Tinkering with Food and Family: Striving for Good Care in an Eating Disorder Treatment Centre in Italy, was based on fourteen months of fieldwork among patients, healthcare professionals and family carers inside and outside the residential, semi-residential and outpatient facilities of an Italian eating disorder treatment centre, in 2018-2019. Drawing on patient-focused anthropological accounts of eating disorders as ‘technologies of the self’, and on existing ethnographic works that have highlighted the failures of eating disorder treatment in other countries, my thesis makes a case for a study of treatment that goes beyond a binary conception of success or failure. By focusing on the professionals of a treatment team and examining the difficult care work that they do as they encounter patients and their families, I highlight the grey areas between failure and success – and suggest how, when difficulties arise and things seem to be failing, novel forms of care emerge as team members try other ways to make their interventions work. 

During the academic year 2021-2022 I was Teaching Associate and Affiliated Lecturer at the Department of Social Anthropology of the University of Cambridge, where I taught at both undergraduate and graduate level. In the academic year 2022-2023 I was ESRC Research Fellow in the same department, supervising dissertations and carrying out further research on two important aspects that emerged during my PhD: 1) the ways in which treatment needs to increasingly adjust to patients who are younger and younger - often children of 8-12 years old; and 2) whether, and in what ways, the ‘family work’ that is done during residential treatment and that is considered fundamental for a successful recovery 'travels back' to patients' homes once they are discharged from the facility, and with what kind of short- and long-term effects.